Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/179

176 we meet everywhere, in the garden, at the table d'hôte, and at the Kochbrunnen, is quite the noisiest and most vulgar person we encounter. Such a person would naturally be fastidious in her associates; and her prime favourite, if we may judge from their constant juxtaposition, is a coloured man with woolly hair, some say from New-Orleans, others that he is a West Indian. I do not speak of this in any disrepect to him, but as a proof that colour is no disqualification in European society.

night, while the fair young duchess was dancing at a brilliant soirée at her palace at Bieberich, a courier arrived with the news of the duke's death of apoplexy while drinking the waters of his bubbles of Kissingen. Rather a startling change from that sound of revelry to the knell of widowhood—from being the "cynosure of all eyes" to be the dowager stepdame of the reigning duke!

Our host tells us the duke was "un bon enfant" (a good fellow), and much beloved, and will he much regretted. No one can doubt that a sober, well-intentioned man of forty-five, who is to be succeeded by a boy of twenty, is a great loss to his people. Where power has, as here, no constitutional restrictions, the people are at the mercy of the personal character of the sovereign.

good people of Wiesbaden seem to take the